1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a remote managing technology and more particularly, a remote managing system and method for the system which, at the time a service is provided in a network formed between a management server and a management device, assigns a server role to the management server.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
As computing technologies advance, a wide variety of applications are now adopting a remote management-based system. For example, various kinds of terminals used in workplaces are equipped with an agent program for the control thereof; a management server, being coupled with such an agent program, controls individual terminals.
However, a management server of such kind is required to change its system configuration to accommodate a network structure since installation positions of terminals equipped with an agent program on the network or installation conditions imposed are different from each other. In other words, it is a common observation that for most system environments, a management server is connected to a network, commonly through a firewall, and a terminal employing an agent program can be used for various kinds of network environments; thus, due to the constraints on network configuration, additional costs for dedicated management or processing such as a firewall, router, and the like are required in the middle of a routing path to ensure bilateral connectivity. Moreover, according to such a network configuration, to accommodate a configuration set-up for various kinds of firewalls installed at agent-side terminals, services provided by a management server (for example, remote procedure call (RPC) service) are required to carry out configuration for RPC service, and continuous management of the services is required to cope with a network change.
To deal with this situation, standard specifications have been developed, where SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is one of such communication standards. SOAP RPC is heavily used for service-to-service communication, carrying out data linkage at a predetermined time by a real-time or batch process, for example. Unless SOAP is used for bilateral data exchange, a server's role is almost fixed and accordingly, the server's role in a network is not changed, thus making communication performed easily. However, if the role of a server is changed as in the case where the server requests control of the operation of a terminal, the server has to issue a request to the terminal and therefore, the server has to perform the role of a client in the network; examples of communication protocol for such a case include FTP (File Transfer Protocol), SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), and so on. In this case, one may confront a connection problem due to the inherent network structure.
In addition, although separate standards or specifications exist dealing with such a case, they cannot be applied the same for all kinds of routers and their application is impossible for those environments where out-bound connections are limited as being located beneath a firewall.